


Gypsobelum

by panthalassa



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-02
Updated: 2014-03-02
Packaged: 2018-01-14 08:41:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1260067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/panthalassa/pseuds/panthalassa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Currently most frustrating for Sherlock was the language’s disgraceful lack of a word for John. Or how he and John were. Are. Had been.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gypsobelum

Sherlock has a vexing relationship with English. Often, an unwitting phrase will lead him on a most pleasing trail towards the solution of a case, but for a language that has dominated global business and communication in recent years, it is shockingly limiting. Unsurprising, then, that it borrows so many words. What self respecting language doesn’t have its own descriptor for pleasure at the misfortune of others, or a person undertaking and operating a new venture? The compound words of German and specificities of French were infinitely more pleasing. Honestly, if the spread of language was not dictated by economic and military concerns, English would have been relegated to the scrap heap of evolution. Or at least to the machinations of the now diminished British Empire.

Currently most frustrating for Sherlock was the language’s disgraceful lack of a word for John. Or how he felt about John. Or how he and John were. Are. Had been for 37 days and 5 hours. Not that John was aware of anything having happened at that particular point in time, but that was when it had bricked Sherlock over the head. Quite forcefully. And he still had no word for it. Not in English, French, German, Latin, Spanish, Russian or Farsi. Sherlock keeps meaning to delete Latin, but it has its occasional uses. Not for this, apparently. Pointless. If it weren’t entirely necessary, Sherlock would abandon language altogether for the precision of mathematics.

John was generally more tolerant of experiments that didn’t involve the kitchen surfaces; Sherlock wondered if he could convince him to communicate entirely via numerical codes. Of course John wouldn’t want to learn an entirely new language, so it would have to correspond to English. Useless.

He sighed and flumped on the couch. Flump was a good word. Much better than swooning, which was how John insisted on continuing to describe Sherlock’s method of transferral from vertical to horizontal, usually appending a rather unfair comparison to women of the Victorian era. Sherlock hadn’t bothered to educate him on the subject.

\---

Sherlock has seven bruises discolouring his skin. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t invest more than a matter of fact curiosity in their formation and rate of discolouration and fade, but these bruises come from John; four fingers, a thumb, a knee and an elbow, all imprinted on Sherlock. He traces them thoughtfully.

\---

It has been 43 days since John had sex. 5’6”. Black hair. Dyed. The tan was real. Parents living in Australia. She had visited for Christmas. 3 weeks. One week less than last year. Tensions persisting in the family over her acrimonious divorce. She usually had multiple lovers, but not in the 22 days she was seeing John. Sherlock still hadn’t deduced why. He hadn’t the faintest idea what her name had been. John had liked her well enough, until he completely forgot that she existed for three whole days while he and Sherlock chased a series of ciphers across rural Surrey.

It’s entirely logical then, given his lack of recent sexual contact, for John’s pupils to become dilated when unexpectedly pressed intimately against another person in a relatively well lit area with no foreign substances in his circulatory system. Sherlock frowns at him curiously, while John huffs a displeased breath into his face, levering himself away from Sherlock and the wall and taking off down the narrow street in pursuit of an informant that now has an eleven second lead. Sherlock strides towards the river, sending John a text about railway tunnels that he will doubtless only read when doubled over several minutes from now, breathing heavily about 0.6 miles away, judging by his average speed. Sherlock thinks again about the warmth of John’s breath on his face. It hadn’t been unpleasant. Corners. Their co-ordination always suffered when trying to round corners too quickly.

\--

Sherlock has learned to speak an entirely new language of facial expressions since living with John. His usual ambivalence towards social cues is a practiced disinterest born of the boredom inspired in him by the general population. But John is interesting; his expressions can be catalogued and used to interpret and index his reactions to Sherlock’s behaviour. Recognising when John will be angry or pleased about Sherlock’s treatment of the living room is incredibly useful, even if Sherlock elects to disregard this knowledge at times of inconvenience. Most of the time. Essentially, it gives him a sense of satisfaction when John can be determined by understandable patterns. And when that look of rapturous wonder comes over his face and Sherlock can prepare to watch Anderson’s supreme discomfort at the forthcoming praise.

At others, John will present him with reactions and patterns that are new and confusing. When Sherlock fails to mention that he filled an empty milk container with a bacterial culture and John pours it into his tea, sighs deeply just once, writes ‘No’ on the container in marker and places it back in the fridge without a riotous outburst of any kind, Sherlock pauses and looks up from his paper. John is washing his cup in the sink and boiling the kettle again. John sits opposite him and props his laptop on his knee. Sherlock goes back to his paper. Sometimes other people are inscrutable, but it bothers him when it’s John.

\--

They cross in the hallway at 3.47am. John came in at 2.25am, having consumed 11 pints of lager and, under duress, 2 shots of tequila. He smells of women’s perfume, but from being crowded together in a narrow booth as opposed to an intimate encounter. He is wearing only his boxers and is still completely intoxicated, on his way to the bathroom. Sherlock has just finished cataloguing the latest range of Bic inks by year and location of production. John walks headlong into Sherlock as if he isn’t there.

“Jesus… Sorry Sh’lock. You ok?”

John grabs his shoulders in a clumsy fashion and peers up at him, leaning entirely too closely with the abandonment of any idea of invasive personal contact common to the inebriated and, usually, Sherlock.

“Fine. Thank you. Your blood alcohol level is elevated, you should drink some water.”

“Mmmm…” John mumbles thoughtfully, “…regret it in the morning.”

“Indeed.”

“G’night.”

John releases him, then gives his chest a parting pat, his hand drawing down across Sherlock’s stomach as he turns to walk into the bathroom. Sherlock concludes that the manner in which every hair on the skin John has touched rises to attention is a reaction to the rapid temperature change and the response to sudden contact. He returns to the living room and listens to Bach’s Sonata No. 5, hands by his side.

\--

“FUCK SAKE!”

They are trapped in a small space. A very small space with little possible hope of rescue and increasingly dropping temperature. John is displeased. Anderson is livid.

“Who calls a forensic team to a crime scene BEFORE THE CRIME HAS BEEN COMMITTED?”

“Yeah, cheers, your screaming in my ear is really working wonders on this door.”

Anderson exhales with more force than John had thought possible.

“Also I don’t know how much air is in here, so maybe can it with the yelling, yeah?”

Anderson’s voice is lower now, but venomous; “I’m not the one who lured us here on a false lead, whose _partner_ immediately went chasing off to what is apparently the actual murder scene or who set off a trap in an empty fucking house!”

The pause in his diatribe left only their heavy breathing as they both struggled with the door, limbs entangled and the muffled banging feet away indicating that Sally and Lestrade were in much the same situation.

“Look, he’ll be back.”

Anderson’s scorn was palpable. And unusually silent. John could hear Lestrade calling for back up with a depth of embarrassment he could only imagine. He let his head thump back against the damp wood. His confidence that Sherlock would in fact find his absence noticeable, his wellbeing of concern and his safety of more interest than a faked suicide pact could best be described as minimal.

“Lestrade’s calling someone. We might as well wait it out.”

\--

“I need to stab you.”

“Excuse me?”

“Fine. _May_ I stab you?”

“Because not saying please was clearly the problem with that statement?”

“John, I don’t have all day. Our client is still unconscious and her uncle may be leaving London as we speak.”

\--

John trips over Sherlock very ungraciously. The plaster cast encasing his left arm offsets his balance even further, and he steadies himself against the opposite wall narrowly abvoiding meeting forcefully with the floor outside his bedroom door currently occupied by his slightly dishevelled looking flatmate.

“What the hell, Sherlock?”

John rubs at his ribs through his pyjamas, still bruised from a recent encounter with the ground that had not been so successfully avoided.

Sherlock looks up at him.

“You have a chest injury. I’ve been counting your respirations every twenty minutes.”

John exhales. Softly.

\--

Sherlock hesitantly touches the angry spiderweb of blood vessels on John’s jaw; unnaturally dark against the pale hospital sheets. Blunt force trauma to the back of the head and multiple shrapnel injuries from flying debris in the crash. He draws his hand away before returning to trace the edge of John’s jawline carefully. He isn’t processing the time since the injury was inflicted, the trajectory of the projectile or the rate and distribution of bruising. What matters are the small flickers of pain that cross John’s face in his sleep.

Sherlock scrubs his face with his hands. This feels... inscrutable. He dislikes it.

\--

“Tea?”

John’s hand rests on his shoulder, the warmth bleeding through Sherlock’s thin shirt until he can feel the entire imprint of John’s hand on his skin.

“No.”

He looks up to where John is standing over the armchair. His expression is not in Sherlock’s catalogue.

“Thank you.”

Mild surprise. Commonly associated with any acts of cleanliness, politeness or the acknowledgement of John’s relationships. Sherlock recognises that one.

John squeezes his shoulder gently before letting go and heading into the kitchen. Sherlock looks fixedly at his paper, mapping John’s familiar movements around the room.

\--

They leave Mrs. Hudson lying in the hospital bed, looking so impossibly small that something catches in John’s throat. He expects Sherlock to rage; to stay up half the night tracking down the burglars from half a thumbprint and chase them to the ends of the country to mete out his own justice in the early hours; all beautiful fury and wrathful intellect.

He is silent in the taxi. When they get to Baker Street, he climbs the stairs methodically and sits in the dark of the living room, the streetlights throwing the pattern of their Georgian window across his face. He might be processing a thousand clues in his head, or just one, but he doesn’t tell John to shut up or stop breathing as he makes tea in the kitchen as quietly as possible and sits opposite, sipping hesitantly.

Sherlock is looking straight ahead, tapping a symphony against his forehead. John recognises it, but has no idea what it’s called.

“We…” John is shocked by the loudness of his own voice in the quiet room “..had no way of knowing.” He finishes half heartedly.

Sherlock doesn’t look his way.

“There has been an unmarked white van sitting at the end of Baker Street on three occasions in the past two weeks; once for 43 minutes, the next for 28 and the last for 15. There have been two other break ins on Baker Street during that time, in which no one was injured as they occurred during the day when the residents were at work. 221, while unobtrusive, contains three properties in a respectable area ostensibly occupied by young professionals likely to be in possession of a range of valuables and unlikely to be at home to put up a fight at 11am in the morning. While the thieves did not anticipate Mrs. Hudson’s presence or reaction, we could and should have foreseen theirs.”

John counts Sherlock’s respirations. 18. 25. 32.

“I thought it was boring.” Softer.

His pulse is visibly racing against his porcelain skin. 87bpm and rising.

John is overwhelmed by the desire to enfold him and smooth out every sharp corner of his awkward frame. He breathes into his mug of tea for some time, the steam making his view of his flatmate shimmer and flicker. Sherlock plays the violin in jagged gasps. John washes their mugs.

\--

John is covered in blood. His movements and the spatter pattern indicate that it is not his own, but Sherlock’s steady gait evolves into a run. John is supporting himself against a lamppost, his lungs heaving. Sherlock runs his hands hurriedly over John’s torso.

“Ok. I’m.. ok… Sherlock.” John gasps for air between words. Sherlock’s hands are in his hair and on his face, holding his eyes up to the light.

“Are you hurt?”

“No really. I’m… fine.” John’s lungs drink in air as he waves his arm feebly in the direction of the fleeing shooter. Sherlock’s hand is cold on the back of his neck as he presses his forehead to John’s.  He is still attempting to regain normal respiration and this doesn’t help. He closes his eyes and leans against his flatmate, allowing his head fall to Sherlock’s shoulder and suddenly arms are wrapped fiercely around him.

He has no idea what they look like; covered in blood and clinging to each other at all hours of the night, neither of them with a coat, but he doesn’t much care. Sherlock’s face is buried in his neck, his breath stirring the hairs there. John opens his mouth against the delicate skin of Sherlock’s collarbone. It is sharp with sweat and cold with the early morning air. He runs a hand through Sherlock’s curls. His flatmate breathes him in as though he is the last thing on earth.

“Fersh amuhururrrr eshpashinn.”

“What?”

Sherlock extricates himself. “There’s a murderer escaping.”

He looks at John for a long, desperate moment before breaking into a run across Waterloo Bridge.

\--

There is a crime scene to deal with and awkward stares on the Jubilee line. By the time John gets home, Sherlock is sprawled across the couch. Or at least John guesses that he is by the trajectory of his voice, as it is almost pitch black in the flat with the heavy curtains drawn and the lights off. The sound of the door closing seems louder than it should.

“You distract me.”

“Um, hello?”

“What I mean to say is that I find it difficult to remain focused on my work when there is the possibility that you may be grievously injured. This… discomfits me.”

John shifts awkwardly. “Is this a conversation that we can have with the lights on and when I’m not covered in blood or…?”

The air in the room shifts as Sherlock propels himself off the couch.

“What is this?”

John has no response to the question, originating inches above his head and somewhere vaguely to his left.

“What do we call it?” Sherlock presses.

John’s voice is quiet, resigned. “I don’t know.”

Trust the world’s only consulting detective to press for definition of a thing before confirmation of it. Although, reasons John, who needed it? What they failed to hide from Mrs. Hudson and the Metropolitan Police didn’t particularly warrant investigation. John has no idea what’s going on; only that he woke up one morning on the sofa, surrounded by case files, looked at Sherlock miraculously and for once asleep in the chair opposite and realised that that was what he would gladly wake up to every day for the rest of his life. Aside from that, he couldn’t really claim to have any grasp on the situation whatsoever, least of all be capable of appending a name to it.

He reaches a hand out tentatively and it meets the cold buttons of Sherlock’s shirt. Unless he’s changed since getting home, it’s a deep royal blue with opalescent buttons. He may still not rate highly on Sherlock’s scale of intelligence, but his skills of observation have increased. He runs his fingers gently down them, pausing as Sherlock presses into the touch.

\--

The kettle comes to a noisy, rumbling boil, its thundering reverberating down the kitchen counter to where John is eyeing the morning paper, absently eating some toast. Sherlock’s eyes are level with the worktop surface, watching two snails struggle across its vibrating surface.

“We used to do that when I was a kid. Racing snails.”

Sherlock’s tone is one of bored patience.

“It’s not racing; it’s an experiment.”

“If you say so.” Sherlock benefits briefly from John’s wry smile before returning his focus to the task at hand.

“The article you’re reading about that pop woman must be of extreme benefit.”

John snorts and inhales some of his toast. “That… pop woman?”

Sherlock hates to leave any stage of an experiment undocumented, but as his flatmate is currently wheezing for air and thumping himself on the chest, intervention seems favourable.

John feels a glass of water thrust into his hand and takes deep, grateful gulps. Sherlock’s eyes are crinkled with amusement.

“Yes. That pop woman. That’s your ‘that pop woman’ face.”

 “I’m not sure Madonna would appreciate being referred to as ‘that pop woman’.”

“Never met her. You have marmalade on your nose.”

He swipes it off and eats it, withdrawing his index finger from his mouth with a pop.

The snails have travelled almost two inches in his absence. The experiment will have to be revisited.

John concedes defeat to the toast and leans back against the counter.

“You know I read an article about snails in the Metro yesterday. Apparently they actually stab each other with these dart things as part of their partnership. It sounded quite dangerous. And painful.”

Sherlock’s smile reaches all the way to his eyes.

“What’s it called?”


End file.
